A. Field
The invention relates to a cladding element for constructing building facades.
B. Related Art
In the prior art, many different modes of construction are known for making building facades. In some conventional constructions, for instance, a facade of a building is constructed or formed of the masonry itself, closing the building on the outside by a masonry facade element, or facade elements adhered to the masonry, or by a plaster layer, or by concrete constructions, or by concealing means, such as glass, metal, or other suitable materials. The aforementioned constructions, which belong to the field of conventional facades and which are naturally not exhaustively listed above, are understood here to be merely examples, and are typically fitted directly to the building to be built; that is, they are either set up directly on site where the building is constructed or are prefabricated elsewhere and set up and fitted directly to the building to suit structural requirements.
All these facades, however, depending on the type of the embodiment, have the disadvantage in that they are typically not suited to rapidly building a facade of a building, especially in the industrial field, such as for making facades of factory and warehouse buildings.
To be able to overcome this problem, so-called lamination or panel facades have been developed, which comprise separate individual panel modules, which are secured individually to previously built frame constructions that are applied to an external masonry or other kind of outer wall of a building. These individual panel modules having predetermined lengths and predetermined widths can intrinsically at least partly solve the problems of the known, aforementioned conventional facade cladding solutions, since to a certain extent, with regard to geometric sizes, they can be manufactured and furnished as mass-produced products, and individually adapting these individual modules at the site of the building construction currently requires relatively less effort than the above conventional constructions.
However, the disadvantage of these known individual panels is that an outer surface provided or lined with them still in principle remains open-faced in its entirety, since even when mounted on an outer surface, for example, the individual panels always remain individual panels, regardless of the size of the facade to be clad with them. Another disadvantage of these known individual panels is that each individual panel has to be mounted separately, and the speed at which the outer surfaces of buildings is lined or clad is therefore relatively slow; that is, a great deal of time is needed because each individual panel has to be taken up in the hand, and each one also must be separately mounted individually. Furthermore, facades embodied in this way are typically not tight from all external angles of visual observation, so that often at certain angles of observation, the mounting elements, support elements and other elements, such as ducts and pipes, remain visible behind a facade made up of individual panels.
It is accordingly the object of the present invention to create a cladding element with which fast, tight and dimensionally stable cladding of facades of buildings is possible, which in the process forms a completely closed facade face without using separate connecting elements. Another object of the present invention is to make it possible to erect a facade that is free of separate wall subconstructions such as are necessary in securing individual panels, and further wherein the cladding element is prefabricatable in such a way that, in principle, only in an individual case does it have to be cut to building-specific lengths that may be required by the structural specifications of the building to be clad. The cladding element also should be capable of being manufactured simply and economically.